Anxiety and Depression

Many of us have experienced not only fear but also depression during the pandemic. We must first understand that these are feelings to grasp the difference between anxiety and depression.

As soon as we form a simple and precise image of it, emotion, which is pain, ceases to be suffering. We are less likely to suffer from them if we can better grasp each of these emotions.

Difference between anxiety and depression

Emotions are related to a shift in the preparation for the action of a person. This theory makes sense if you focus on how feelings have been wired into our physiology. An emotion focuses its mind and narrows its perceived action repertoire when a person perceives danger in their environment and creates physiological changes to support those particular actions.

Each emotion, therefore, contains a component of arousal or stimulation that relates to how strongly an emotion stimulates a person to take action. Anxiety, depending on how intensely it is perceived, may be either a low- or high-arousal emotion. In our climate, the more we interpret a threat, the greater our level of anxiety.

Both anxiety and depression are responses not only to a primary assessment that obstructs our goals or values by an individual, circumstance, or occurrence but also to a secondary evaluation of whether we can handle it. It is in the second assessment where these feelings vary.

We assume that in the case of anxiety, we should do anything to reduce the threat's influence and set our lives back on track. On the other side, for depression, we do not keep a conviction like that. In other words, once we have given up hope that we can cope with the person, circumstance, or event, we become depressed.

Depression is a disconnection from all of your external worlds because you don't think you can take any viable steps to get your life back to where you want it to be.

Anxiety, believe it or not, seen in this way, inspires hope. The reason we experience anxiety is that we still believe that we can do anything to alleviate the situation that triggers it. We believe we can change our lot at some stage, often subconsciously.

On the other hand, depression is a low-arousal emotion because we have let go of this illusion that concrete steps can be done to reduce the danger and shift our lives in a better direction. We feel like there's nothing left to do for us.

Let's bear in mind, then, that we only feel anxiety when we are worried about a person, circumstance, or event in our environment and we feel that there is something we can do to handle it. We would no longer feel fear if we were to feel it was beyond our control.

The significance of emotion, whether it is positive or negative, is determined by these continuous assessments. We experience a positive emotion such as joy, gratitude, or exhilaration if we assess the person, circumstance, or event as facilitating our goals or values.

If, on the other hand, we evaluate the person, circumstance, or occurrence that prevents us from achieving a goal or value, we feel a negative emotion, such as frustration, disappointment, or, yes, anxiety. Is this person, scenario, or event good or bad for me in this primary assessment? Generates a primary emotion.

We then make a secondary evaluation after we experience a primary emotion. Do I have the internal resources to deal with this person, situation, or event? We determine our ability to control whatever it is that has stimulated the negative emotions that surround us.

Then we will see it as it is, rather than perceiving fear as a feeling to be avoided: a constructive catalyst to protect ourselves from a low-level, but ominous, threat in our lives. We should agree that it becomes unstable only when anxiety goes untreated and becomes unmanageable.

During this pandemic, we have to recognize that what has already happened (e.g., the past trajectory of the virus and many policymakers' weak responses to it) will not be reversed. We can now turn fear into recognition (of what has already happened), ambition (to bring about the better world we know is possible) and action (to make it happen, beginning today) on various levels: economic , political, social , psychological, physical (health)

Let's take to heart the basic distinction between anxiety and depression to help control our anxiety during the greatest public health epidemic of our lifetimes: depression is anxiety that has given up hope. Instead of letting go of our confidence in our ability to cope with adversity, let's balance recognition, determination, and action to build a better world for all of us who inhabit this planet.